Looking for Poetry
by scylla-charybdis
Summary: Someone told him that there was no right way to read a poem. He found that there isn't, except when there is. SLASH H/D .


**Title**: Looking for Poetry

**Summary**: Someone told him that there was no right way to read a poem...he found that there isn't -- except when there is.

_...Come close and consider the words._

_With a plain face hiding thousands of other faces_

_and with no interest in your response,_

_whether weak or strong,_

_each word asks:_

_did you bring the key?_

_- Looking for Poetry by Carlos Drummond de Andrade (translated)_

Professor McGonagall had had an extensive library in her personal rooms. But she couldn't take it with her, and so the two of them swallowed their grief and arrived to help clear it out for the next Transfiguration teacher. The windows let in a breezy summer Saturday as he pulled another book off the shelf. A Child's Garden of Verses. What an odd title.

He remembered that someone had told him that there was no right way to read a poem. The words drifted back to him as he dropped the slim volume of verse into the box.

There's no right way to read a poem. Whatever you read into it or whatever you don't read into it, that's just what it means. There are no rules about reading poetry; you must remember this.

But that implied that there was no wrong way to read a poem, and he knew that that wasn't true. There was a wrong way to go about doing anything, and he had misread so many verses, that he could barely find any beauty in them anymore.

Once, he'd watched a cat waltz by, swaying on her feet like a whore. He recognized as a poem of life and motion, but then the animal overlooked a ward. It was still and dead in less time than it took to rip a page. It had not been a poem about life, but a poem about war, and that was not the last misread that he'd committed, either.

There was the time he'd looked at the stars and thought that their poem was about eternity and serenity. The very next night, the sky fell right onto the only thing he had ever loved, and it was only chance that the people he treasured most were not destroyed along with it. Star-fire was unsuited to earth, and that night had been a lesson in chaos as he and a handful of others tried to contain the inferno and save as many lives as possible. They saved all those who needed to be saved, but they had to let everyone else die. The poetry of the stars, he discovered, was one of terrible potential and human insignificance.

Things that he used to see poetic beauty in -- the rare colors of a rainbow -- had been turned into something else, something wrong. Suddenly, angels wouldn't have mercy on his ghosts, for the washed out arch of color hung in the sky over a field of bodies, loath to come near such mortality.

He had begun to think that there really were no right ways to read poetry; there were only wrong ways.

Irritated by his thoughts, he let another book of poems fall into the box with a dusty thud.

"What are you thinking?"

This voice was both real and familiar, and he responded without looking up. "Why do you ask?"

"You're frowning again."

Oh.

He half turned to look at the speaker, who was boxing up books from the next shelf. And it occurred to him: Of course there were right ways to read a poem.

This was one lithe verse that he'd never misunderstood. Although he hadn't always enjoyed it, he had always known every intention in those long and ungraceful hands. He had always understood the awkward and enthusiastic meter of those movements. He knew the iambic rhythms of breath and heart and step and passion inherently and intimately, for they were the same as his own. In return, he had found himself explicitly and intrinsically recognized.

"It's nothing," he replied, smiling a bit. That earned him a doubtful look, but he said nothing more.

Then he found himself being pulled to his feet, just as he'd anticipated, and wrapped in a familiar embrace. He breathed in their mingled scents -- the smell of fire and love and green grass and flying too high -- and he smiled all the more because it rhymed, except in words.

As they stood there, secure in each other's arms, he realized that they were two people, but one rhythm, one rhyme, one poem.

PAU


End file.
